SOURCE: "The Political Significance of Gulliver's Travels," in Swift and His Contexts, edited by John Irwin Fischer, Herman J. Real and James Woolley, AMS Press, 1989, pp. 1-20.

In the following essay, Downie argues that critics have gone too far in making links between real events and people in British history and the contents of Gulliver's Travels. He suggests that Swift was writing a more general "parallel history" rather than a decipherable allegorical text intended to serve as an exposé.

Seventy years have passed since Sir Charles Firth first made use of the title I have chosen for my essay. "Political allusions abound in the Travels," Firth asserted in his lecture to the British Academy in 1919. In saying this, he was, in one respect, doing little more than endorsing the view which had been taken of Swift's masterpiece ever since its first publication. But Firth wished to codify such...